Charles Apple

We can talk about content and design and fonts and multimedia and the fate of the industry until we’re all blue in the face. But out in Liberal, Kansas, Earl Watt and his dedicated team are showing us what real journalism is all about.

We wrote Tuesday about The High Plains Daily Leader of Liberal, Kansas, which published its first edition Sunday.

A recap: The owners of The Daily Times in Liberal — population 20,000 — decided to cut back to publishing only twice a week. Watt, — the editor and publisher — didn’t take kindly to that. Check out this quote:

“I told them this community would reject that like a baboon’s heart,” said Watt, 37. But three days a week didn’t fare much better, he said.

“The public was upset,” he said. “They were dropping subscriptions. … Three days a week was kind of a slap in the face to the community. They felt embarrassed by it.”

‘Reject that like a baboon’s heart’! You have to love this guy!

So Watt walked off the job and started his own daily newspaper. About 70 percent of his staff followed him, reports Maria Sudekum Fisher of the Associated Press.

Tina Bridenstine of the Daily Leader staf saw my post yesterday and answered a few of my questions. She writes:

We had to move a little earlier than expected, so we’re still working on getting everything going, but we’ve got a CTP machine and a press. (I don’t know what kind of press. All I know is it will print 4 color pages in an 8 page section.) Right now the papers are being sent to a newspaper in a nearby town and they’re printing them for us until we get our press up and running.

All of the design staff followed the publisher to the new paper. Though the “design staff” consists of one sports reporter, two reporters, and an editor.

The editor lays out the news pages, the sports reporter puts together the sports pages, and the other reporter and I design a few special pages in different editions.

Basically, all of the composing, reporters, ad sales, and almost all of the business dept. came to the new paper. Two more people came over yesterday, so I think the count right now is 18 people that came to the new paper and 4 people who stayed at the old paper.

She also sent me a copy of Sunday’s front — the first edition of the Daily Leader:

Naturally, I’m not crazy about the ad across the top of A1. But hey, you pay for your paper any way you can. And there is a font reversion happening with the promo to the girls’ softball story.

Tina replies:

I’ve heard ads across the top of the paper aren’t really popular, but it’s something they did at the old paper and it’s carried over here.

And that font on the softball story is supposed to be Aachen Bold, but it was missing for some reason when I saved the page as an eps. Other than that, I think everything showed up like it should have.

But those are very minor quibbles, given what these folks have gone through over the past few days. That’s an extraordinarily great looking page! Thanks so much for sharing it with us!

Again, according to the AP story, The Daily Leader is circulating about 7,000 copies x 14 broadsheet pages each afternoon. However, I notice the page above states Sunday’s edition was 16 pages.

And, the AP says, The Daily Leader plans to publish a Spanish-language edition today and to establish a web site by the end of the week.

Best wishes to the fine, brave folks at The Daily Leader. Please keep us posted!

—
EDIT

Yes, there was more to the story. We posted this later that same day. And here is the latest. 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Innovative ideas, Small papers, News design, Industry woes, Newspapers, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.